Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, July 08, 2019

Iran claims US begged to bomb uninhabited desert to "save face." The West ignores the honor/shame mindset at its peril.

As we've mentioned many times before, one of the fundamental mistakes that Western analysts and leaders make when dealing with the Middle East is not understanding the honor/shame culture of Arab and Muslim societies.

Western Liberal thought is based on the idea that everyone is generally the same and thinks the same way. The concept that some people think in a fundamentally different way appears, on some level, to be racist, and therefore the truth is ignored. This leads to catastrophic results in the basic assumptions of how to deal with Arabs and Muslims. Westerners understand that they must not shame members of these societies but assume that this is more an etiquette issue than something that must be thoroughly understood - and that can be used to advantage.

The mistake of assuming that the other side thinks the same way is not only done by the Western side. A small story in the Iranian media illustrates this perfectly:

TEHRAN – The commander of the Civil Defense Organization said on Sunday that the U.S. has sent a message to Iran saying it wanted to conduct a limited strike against the country in order to save face after Iran shot down its drone.

“After the downing of its intruding drone, the United States told us through diplomatic intermediaries that it wanted to carry out a limited operation in an unimportant and deserted region to save face and asked us to avoid giving them a response, but Iran said it would regard any operation as the initiation of a war,” Mehr quoted Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali as saying.

Jalali censured Washington’s warmongering rhetoric against Tehran, saying any move against the integrity of Iran will be firmly dealt with.

This general is giving a message to his people - not only has Iran shamed the US by shooting down the drone, but that the US was anxious to save face by humbly begging Iran for permission to retaliate symbolically. Proud Iran, of course, rejected this request, thereby further humiliating the Americans.

(There is little more comical than claiming that Donald Trump can be shamed.)

Iran's definition of victory is humiliation. Westerners look at this as a quaint cultural quirk and refuse to understand how fundamental this thinking is.

The proper response to any conflict with states that are so wedded to the idea of honor/shame is to calibrate responses to maximize shame. Iran isn't afraid of some US bombs per se; but they are very afraid if the response to their aggression makes them look weak or incompetent. So any military response would have to emphasize that Iran's defenses are poor, and therefore shameful. Iran's rhetoric should not be ignored nor should it be responded to in kind - it must be ridiculed to the world. Iranians should be made into a joke.

Right now, Iran is testing the waters to see how Europe will respond to their explicit violations of the nuclear agreement. So far Europe has failed that test by clinging onto the hope that, behind the scenes, Iran might change its mind. This is a major mistake. Europe must say that the slightest violation will result in a major economic retaliation. Their failure to do so has shamed them, in Iran's eyes, and therefore they have lost their influence - the very thing that they believe they are maintaining by their position. Iran now has proven that it can act with impunity and Europe will meekly beg for scraps. Iran controls the EU.

The honor/shame culture isn't something to be treated as unimportant as table manners. How one responds to aggression must include how to judiciously use shame as a weapon that is just as important as bombs and sanctions.

Their Middle Eastern fear of shame is a resource that the West must add to its arsenal.

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Iranian media claims Israel is trying to steal water from the Nile

Tehran's attempts to incite the Arabs against Israel became quite amusing yesterday.

From the Tehran Times:

The Daily Telegraph has accused Iran of devastating activities in Africa, while Washington, Riyadh and Tel Aviv are continuing to plunder the rich African continent under the shadow of news cover-up by the Western media outlets. There should be a lot of focus on the role of Israel in this campaign.

About six decades ago, Golda Meir put a great emphasis on the African continent in line with the interests of Israel. As a result, Mossad officers were scattered across the continent as a cancerous tumor so that the U.S. can find another partner in its efforts to loot African riches. Now, Ethiopia, Sudan and Kenya are important for Tel Aviv in terms of their geographic and strategic location.

Located in the Horn of Africa, these countries overlook Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Yemen. In any case, Israel has new plans to interfere in the internal affairs of Africa.

Israel is now facing water crisis. The glow of the Nile waters is making the eyes of the Zionist regime look greedy to Egypt. Israel is struggling to expand its influence in the Horn of Africa to find a foothold in the entrance of the Red Sea.

Undoubtedly, in the near future documents will be released on U.S. and other Western countries’ support for Tel Aviv in its plundering of African. Beyond that, intervention by France, Britain and some other European countries in northern and some other parts of Africa is continuing unabatedly like the past centuries.

Rather than stealing water from Arab nations, Israel is actually planning to provide water to Jordan, with a pipeline being built to bring desalinated water from the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kinneret) that Jordan will have access to. Half of Israel's domestic water is now being provided by either desalination or treated wastewater, and the percentage is growing every year.

Israel isn't about to take water from the Nile, even if it could figure out a way to do it.

The article is called "A conspiracy that will fail," meaning that when it is seen in a few years that Israel hasn't stolen any water from the Nile, the Iranian media can say that they helped foil the nonexistent plan.

Perhaps more amusing is the map that accompanied the Tehran Times article - it includes Israel.

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07/07 Links: Netanyahu: Archaeology, DNA prove Palestinians not native to Land of Israel; Sam Schulman, last surviving US crew member on legendary ‘Exodus,’ dies at 91

From Ian:

Netanyahu: Archaeology, DNA prove Palestinians not native to Land of Israel

Could DNA testing prove Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s politics? He seems to think so.

On Sunday, Netanyahu tweeted that, “A new study of DNA recovered from an ancient Philistine site in the Israeli city of Ashkelon confirms what we know from the Bible – that the origin of the Philistines is in southern Europe,” quoting research released last week by the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, which revealed that the ancient people most known for their biblical conflict with the Israelites were immigrants to the region in the 12th century BCE.

“For 30 years, we excavated at Ashkelon, uncovering Canaanites, early Philistines and later Philistines – and now we can begin to understand the story that these bones tell,” said Daniel M. Master, director of the Leon Levy Expedition to Ashkelon, who headed the excavations.

The team used state-of-the-art DNA technologies on ancient bone samples unearthed during the excavation from 1985-2016. Analyzing for the first time genome-wide data retrieved from people who lived in Ashkelon during the Bronze and Iron ages (around 3,600 to 2,800 years ago), the team found that a substantial proportion of their ancestry was derived from a European population. This European-derived ancestry was introduced into Ashkelon around the time of the Philistines’ estimated arrival in the 12th century BCE.

“The Bible mentions a place called Caphtor, which is probably modern-day Crete,” Netanyahu continued in a follow up tweet. “There’s no connection between the ancient Philistines & the modern Palestinians, whose ancestors came from the Arabian Peninsula to the Land of Israel thousands of years later.”

Another Sampson blinded in Gaza

Hooray for Pallywood, or rather Gazallywood, that wonderful melange of misleading footage, falsehoods, fakeries and frauds that makes up so much of what the Western media reports as going on in Gaza. The latest offering was brought to Australia by Todd Sampson, co-creator of Earth Hour and host of Body Hack on Channel 10, which was made with generous funding from unsuspecting taxpayers, courtesy of Screen Australia and Create NSW.

Mr Sampson says he was assisted by the only female fixer in Gaza and not since Samson fell for Delilah and had his eyes gouged out by the Philistines has anyone been quite so blind to Palestinian shenanigans in Gaza.

Sampson says his original mission was to document the lives of medics in Gaza, but once he met his fixer, he ended up making something else. What? Hamas propaganda. ‘Body Hack is not a political show, we’re not here to take sides,’ says Sampson somewhat disingenuously, since he didn’t even try to present two sides to the story; he spent three weeks filming in Gaza and none in Israel. As he gads about from one lethal ‘protest’ to the next, he is perpetually surprised when he and his Hamas minders are shot at as they charge at Israeli soldiers and sailors. ‘It’s starting to feel to me like a sick form of target practice,’ he whinges, as if he thinks the whole thing is a nasty game the Israelis are playing. ‘It’s really hard not to take sides, when one side is shooting at you,’ he announces. Well, what a surprise. That is how Israelis feel. Since Hamas seized power in Gaza, in 2006, Israeli civilians have been bombarded with rockets and mortars; more than 600 were fired in May this year, and more than 20,000 have been fired at Israel since 2001. Sampson doesn’t cover that. He is only interested in Palestinian pain. ‘To not show what we showed would be to omit the truth,’ he says, but it is his sins of omission which distort reality. He talks of Israel bombing a school without explaining that Hamas weapons were hidden in it or flattening apartment blocks without explaining that Hamas shoots weapons from heavily populated areas to use civilians as human shields. There is no mention of Hamas diverting millions of dollars in international aid into constructing tunnels to allow terrorists to infiltrate Israel. Or conversely of the thousands of Palestinians who are treated in Israeli hospitals every year.

Rift opens in UK Labour over whistle-blowers ahead of anti-Semitism exposé

The British Labour Party came under fresh attack Sunday after it was revealed that it had cracked down on whistle-blowers by threatening to sue ex-staffers who spoke to the BBC for an exposé on anti-Semitism within the opposition faction.

According to the Sunday Times, at least six former Labour officials agreed to speak to the public broadcaster and provide new details on anti-Jewish sentiment within the party and its handling of the widespread allegations against it and leader Jeremy Corbyn. The ex-employees did so despite having signed non-disclosure agreements with the party.

Lawyers representing Labour have now sent some of the former staffers letters threatening to sue them and accusing them of “wantonly disregarding their obligations by selectively leaking information to the media,” the report said.

BBC TV’s Panorama investigation is set to air on Wednesday and is expected to be critical of Labour and feature further evidence that Corbyn advisers intervened in disciplinary procedures to protect members accused of anti-Semitism. The exposé will also feature interviews with “key insiders,” according to a preview.

Labour reportedly received some details of the show’s content when BBC contacted the party to get its reaction to the Panorama program, titled “Is Labour Antisemitic?”

In a letter sent by the Carter Ruck law firm, which is representing the party, to Sam Matthews, Labour’s former head of disputes, it said some information presented in the documentary apparently could “only have come from you,” according to the Sunday Times.

EXCLUSIVE: Labour has launched a crackdown on whistleblowers ahead of bombshell BBC Panorama doc on antisemitism. Carter Ruck, their lawyers, have written to Sam Matthews, ex head of investigations, saying the party "will not tolerate" ex employees "wantonly disregarding" NDAs pic.twitter.com/0koCyPNnMB
— Gabriel Pogrund (@Gabriel_Pogrund) July 6, 2019

The Mujahideen Brigades announced the "martyrdom" of a field commander, Radwan Amara, either 25 or 28.

Most reports don't go into details of his death beyond that he was injured several weeks ago during a "jihadist mission."

However, bits and pieces (so to speak) of the reports indicate that he killed by a rocket explosion in a house in the al-Shojaeya neighborhood in Gaza City. He did not live in that neighborhood, and he was reported to have been killed in a rocket workshop, so the house itself was a rocket manufacturing facility.

Needless to say, building weapons in a residential neighborhood is a violation of international law. Not that people who pretend to care about international law in the region spend too much time looking at violations by Gaza terrorists.

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Linda Sarsour @lsarsour doesn't know her Quran. (Or history. )

On Twitter, Linda Sarsour wrote:

Where to start?

Jesus' physical attributes are not once mentioned in the Quran.

There are hadiths that do mention them, but they contradict each other - some saying straight hair, others curly; some say he had a dark complexion and others say white (and with freckles.)

It is all academic because Jesus was a Jew from Judea and most Jews from Judea at the time looked like Mizrahi Jews look today. Sarsour is trying to distinguish Jesus from other Jews and looks like an idiot.

The Quran makes it clear that Jesus was a Jew, saying multiple times that he was sent by Allah to preach to the Children of Israel - of which he was obviously a member. Moreover, the Quran's other references to the Children of Israel makes it clear that Jews are a nation, not just a religion, with land given to them by Allah - land that they lived in in Jesus' time.

Obviously, non-Quranic sources confirm that the Jews are a people, not just a religion.

Furthermore, "Palestine" is not mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Christian Bible or the Quran. Sarsour is claiming that there was a nation called Palestine in Jesus' time - not only is that patently false, there never was a nation called Palestine in all of history.

Finally, Sarsour lies that Jews and Arabs (who she falsely calls "Palestinians" lived in peaceful co-existence before Israel was founded. The history of attacks by Arabs on Jews before Israel is quite extensive. Just in the single town of Tzfat (Safed,) Jews were attacked in 1517, 1660, 1834, 1838 and 1929.

That's about seven lies (Jesus was Palestinian, Quran describes his features, in Islamic tradition he is undoubtedly Semitic looking, Palestinian is a nationality, Palestine was a nation in Jesus' time, the Jewish people are not a nation, Jews lived peacefully with Arabs pre-1948) in two tweets.

Not bad, Linda. But I know you can do better.

UPDATE: Sarsour also is now claiming that Bethlehem is an Arabic name.

Apparently, whenever a place name is transliterated into Arabic, it becomes Arab.

Sheesh.

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The National Education Association is the is the largest labor union and professional interest group in the United States, with over 3 million members, mostly public school teachers. It is the mainstream base of the Democratic party, with the overwhelming percentage of political contributions from the NEA (95% in 2012) going to Democratic candidates.

For the past two years, anti-Israel membrs have tried to push agenda iems against Israel at the NEA's annual convention.

Last year, New Business Item 92 stated:

NEA will support efforts to prevent U.S. aid being used to detain, interrogate, abuse, and imprison Palestinian children in Israel’s adult military courts.

Rationale: Israel is the only country in the world systematically detaining and prosecuting children in military courts. 500-700 children are prosecuted annually since 2010.

Solution: Representative McCollum’s bill, H.R. 4391 promotes human rights by ending Israeli detention of children.

This year, at the annual National Education Association Representative Assembly in Houston, a group of members who hate Israel tried to push through a different agenda item, where they would partner with BDS groups:

NEA will use existing digital communication to develop and publish resources to educate members and the general public on the apartheid, atrocities, and gross violations of human rights of Palestinian children and families by the State of Israel, funded directly by the United States.

NEA will publish an article in the NEA Today on the work that is being done by our members and organizations fighting for the rights of Palestinian children and families, such as but not limited to: Parents Against Child Detention, HaMoked-Center for the Defense of the Individual, Defense for Children International-Palestine, American Friends Service Committee, US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, Jews Against Anti-Muslim Racism, and Jewish Voice for Peace.

NEA will partner with the No Way to Treat Child Campaign to pressure the Israeli government to end the detention and abuse of Palestinian children.

Rationale/Background
The NEA must oppose the detainment, incarceration, torture, family separation, and murder of children or their families at the hands of the United States, domestically as well as globally.

Both of these measures were defeated, officially for budgetary reasons. I do not know how close the votes were. But the fact that they are being brought up to begin with shows how anti-Israel forces are trying to hijack the largest labor union in the US.

The 2018 proposed item it grossly misleading - the US puts tens of thousands of children in both detention and prison annually, and many countries arrest and detain large numbers of children for military activities - but the words "military courts" is used to attack Israel alone and make it look uniquely evil. The existence of the item is anti-Israel propaganda.

The proposed 2019 item is far worse, and insidious even in its defeat. The language itself pre-supposes that Israel is an apartheid state, and this lie was published in conference materials and at the NEA website as fact. The existence of the business item itself is offensive; akin to a business item denouncing black people for being lazy - even though such an item would soundly defeated, its very existence and being allowed as a business agenda item is a means of mainstreaming lies.

No doubt the bylaws of the NEA do not force fact checking on agenda items, because no one envisioned attempts by special interest groups to use the NEA as a means to mainstream hate. However, teachers themselves should be cognizant of how the very existence of such an item, read by millions of interested union members, is effective anti-Israel propaganda and it makes it easier for next year's anti-Israel resolutions.

These lies, published as fact in an education convention, must be called out and the procedures that allow such lies to be published in official assembly materials must be modified to stop the NEA from unwittingly being a vehicle to push hate.

(h/t Lauri)

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07/06 Links: U.S. Jews shouldn’t honor Kissinger; Yazidi ISIS Survivors in Israel; Iran’s regime arrests 8 Christians, sending them to solitary confinement

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: This giant toast rack won't help us fight hate

Erecting this memorial against the background of epidemic antisemitism in Britain comes perilously close to humbug. Some who lament most loudly over the Jews slaughtered in the Holocaust simultaneously bash Israel and the Jews today with assumed impunity.

Such people would claim the memorial’s existence proves there is no serious antisemitism in Britain. A memorial to dead Jews will be used as a bronze shield for the bigotry being expressed towards live ones.

Memorialising the Holocaust misses another vital point. The expansion of Holocaust memorials and education programmes has not expunged antisemitism. It has been accompanied instead by an explosion in antisemitism.

This is not to say that the one caused the other; but Holocaust memorialising has not acted as the antidote that was intended.

If we really want to build something to fight antisemitism, it should be a monument to living Jews and the State of Israel to celebrate historic Jewish peoplehood and its survival against all the odds.

Doubtless, community leaders would recoil with horror from such a suggestion and call it divisive. Which tells you all you need to know about the real fight against antisemitism in Britain.

Clarion Project: Yazidi ISIS Survivors in Israel Speak to Clarion

Shireen is a Yazidi ISIS survivor from Iraq. She was held as a slave by ISIS for three years after her village in Iraq was overrun by the terror group until she was able to escape during a military onslaught on the terror group.
Listen to Clarion Project’s exclusive interview with Shireen below

Shireen (we are only allowed to use her first name) was in Israel the past two weeks with a group of other Yazidi ISIS survivors who were brought to the country for a post-trauma course at the initiative of Bar Ilan University and IsraAid.

In the group was Lamiya Aji Bashar, who won the 2016 Sakharov Prize. Lamiya lost an eye when a mine exploded near her during a daring escape. The two girls escaping with her were killed by the same mine.

Bashar now lives in Germany where more than 1,000 Yazidi ISIS survivors now reside. These survivors are assisted there by an incredible man, Mirza Dinnayi, himself a Yazidi who moved to Germany decades ago.

Dinnayi heads an NGO in Germany called Luftbrucke Irak dedicated to helping victims of terror. Dinnayi makes a point of visiting Israel every year. This year, after two years of planning, Dinnayi was able to bring the survivors (most of whom still live in Iraq) to Israel, a country which, out of necessity, has developed tools to deal with post-traumatic stress disorders in terror survivors.

It was a logistics feat, considering that Israel has no diplomatic relations with Iraq.

The dedicated course organizers, Professor Ari Zivotofsky and Dr. Yaakov Hoffman, both from Bar Ilan University, feel they have a moral obligation to study the effects of genocide and to share Israel’s expertise in dealing with it.

07/05 Links Pt2: Evelyn Gordon: When Human Rights Become Acceptable Collateral Damage; Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor, who preached forgiveness of Nazis, dies at 85

From Ian:

Evelyn Gordon: When Human Rights Become Acceptable Collateral Damage

Three seemingly unrelated incidents occurred last week, yet all share a common denominator: They exemplify the way anti-Israel politics has corrupted the concept of human rights.

Let’s start with best-selling British novelist Richard Zimler’s report that two British cultural organizations recently refused to host him for lectures about his new book, though he has lectured many times on previous books. “They asked me if you were Jewish, and the moment I said you were, they lost all interest,” he quoted his publicist as saying.

It’s not that these groups have anything against Jews per se. They simply feared that hosting a Jew would make them a target for anti-Israel protesters.

Zimler isn’t Israeli, has no relatives or investments in Israel and doesn’t write about Israel. His latest book is set in the Holy Land 2,000 years ago, but its storyline is Christian rather than Jewish (it’s called The Gospel According to Lazarus). So he wouldn’t seem an obvious target, given BDS apologists’ repeated claim that anti-Zionism isn’t antisemitic.

Unfortunately, much of the anti-Israel crowd hasn’t gotten that memo. See, for instance, the German courts which ruled that torching a German synagogue wasn’t a hate crime, but an understandable anti-Israel protest. Or the student organizations which demanded that a South African university expel all Jewish students to show its pro-Palestinian bona fides. Or the Norwegian attorney general who ruled that “F*** Jews” isn’t hate speech, but an expression of “dissatisfaction with [Israel’s] policies,” although the speaker never mentioned Israel. Or the Dyke Marches that banned Jews from holding Jewish pride flags because they remind some people of Israeli flags. And so forth.

So despite deploring the unnamed organizations’ cowardice, I can’t dismiss their fears as unfounded. And that’s the problem.

Human-rights groups and liberals worldwide rush to defend the “rights” of BDS activists; see, for instance, their opposition to anti-BDS legislation on the false grounds that it violates freedom of speech (it actually applies only to actions, not speech). Yet they’ve shown no interest in defending Jewish rights in most of the examples cited above. Evidently, Jewish rights are acceptable collateral damage for the sacred cause of anti-Zionism.

A Century-Old Defense of Zionism in the American Press

One hundred years ago, the Zionist activist Harry Sachar wrote an essay titled “A Jewish Palestine,” which appeared in the July 1919 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. Writing less than two years after the Balfour Declaration, and a year before the League of Nations assigned the mandate for Palestine to Britain, Sachar made an impassioned plea for the creation of a Jewish homeland in the Land of Israel:

The Zionist movement is a longing and striving to restore to the Jewish people normal national life. . . . The Zionist movement will continue until the Jewish people are once more living a normal national life, when it will be transformed into the active expression of that normal national life.

There are some who deny that there is such a thing as the Jewish people, but the denial is a modern innovation. Very rare is the non-Jew who thinks of Jews as merely a sect without national quality; and it is doubtful whether among the Jews themselves there could be found a single instance of such a denial much earlier than the second decade of the 19th century.

Let us try to clear the ground by attempting not so much a definition as a characterization of Judaism. Judaism is not a religion in the Western sense of the word. Judaism is the precipitated spiritual experience of the Jewish people. The idea of Judaism is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish people, and the idea of the Jewish people is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish land. You may see this in every form and expression of Jewish religious life. Individual prayer, prayer for the individual Jew alone, is exceedingly rare. When the Jew prays, he prays not simply for himself, but for all Israel; and this national conception permeates prayer even in what might be considered to be the most personal and individual incidents of life: birth, marriage, death. The welding of the idea of the Jewish people with the idea of the Jewish land is manifest in every page of the Jewish liturgy.

Cartoon of the Day: Moses meets BDS

Continuing my re-captioning of single panel cartoons...

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07/05 Links Pt1: Melanie Phillips: The dark shadow Iran is casting on the world; Pilgrimage Road and Palestinian Memory; Poll: 80% of Palestinians believe Arabs have abandoned them

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: The dark shadow Iran is casting on the world

The indifference shown to this Jew-baiting over the past two decades and more has helped legitimize and embolden ever more unambiguous demonstrations of this deranged mindset, along with a wider cultural confusion.

Four months ago in Britain, upon learning that the best-selling novelist Richard Zimler was a Jew, two cultural organizations dropped their invitations to him to appear at their events. They said they feared protests by their members and others if they invited a Jewish writer.

Against the backdrop of a bill in the Irish parliament, the Dail, to boycott Israel, an Irish News columnist Brian Feeney wrote that Iran was “the only democracy in the region—no, Israel isn’t.”

After U.S. Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) demeaned the Holocaust by comparing detention centers on America’s Mexican border to Nazi concentration camps, political and cultural figures piled in to support her. When the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum voiced concern about using Holocaust analogies in this way, more than 430 scholars who research the Holocaust and genocides urged it to retract its criticism as “fundamentally ahistorical.”

In Britain, the government wants to build a Holocaust memorial next to the Houses of Parliament to combat Holocaust denial. Yet Britain is still an enthusiast for the Iran deal, even despite the recent discovery of a Hezbollah bomb factory in London.

Sweden, where the authorities notoriously turn a blind eye to rampant anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement, intends to hold a conference on antisemitism next year in Malmö. That’s quite a statement. For Jew-hatred in Malmö is so bad that last month the spokesman for its Jewish community said it might close down altogether in the coming decade.

This is the international background against which Iran is ramping up for war. In Israel, there’s a grim acknowledgement of a world which, while paying ever more extravagant lip service to the victims of the Holocaust, prepares to betray them at every turn.

More than half-a-century ago, the West fought off Nazism. That fight is what it really means by “never again.”

WSJ: Pilgrimage Road and Palestinian Memory

Two thousand years ago Jews walked the Pilgrimage Road as they came from around the world to visit the Temple. Rabbinic texts abound with descriptions of the processions that occurred, and the road - first discovered 15 years ago - parallels these details in an exquisite way. Now pilgrims will be able to ascend stairs as their predecessors once did.

But the Pilgrimage Road is located on land in eastern Jerusalem that Palestinians claim for themselves. Palestinian official Saeb Erekat contended that the road is a "lie that has nothing to do with history." Erekat and many other Palestinian leaders have long denied what archaeologists and historians consider basic and uncontroversial facts, such as the existence of the Temple.

The excavated path is only one bit of a literal mountain of archaeological evidence, uncovered in most cases by secular archaeologists, that confirms the historical fact of Jerusalem's ancient connection to the Jewish people. In an age where actual facts are all too often eschewed for "personal narrative," the Pilgrimage Road is another reminder that peace can only be attained through the recognition of historical truth.

RT! The Truth is revealed! The ancient Philistines from the Bible were Greek Europeans! They had NOTHING to do with the current “Palestinians” who are Arabs that came from Arabia! האמת נחשפת! הפלשתים היו אירופאים, ללא כל קשר ל״פלסטינים״ שהם ערבים מערב https://t.co/AKHpCJNug8
— Yair Netanyahu 🇮🇱 (@YairNetanyahu) July 4, 2019

Analysis: Gulf governments sponsored anti-Semitic hate preachers during Ramadan 2019

Ramadan is a holy month in the Sunni-ruled Gulf monarchies. In addition to daylong fasting, one other aspect of the festival in this region is that governments sponsor a range of religious programming in order to burnish their religious credentials, particularly at state-run mosques and on state-owned television stations.

However, many Gulf governments fail to provide adequate oversight when sponsoring Ramadan programming, arranging events that feature religious leaders who have a longstanding record of anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry. Even if such preachers are more measured in their remarks at these particular government-sponsored events, their state hosts still run the risk of legitimating proponents of bigotry.

Qatar
The Government of Qatar continued to be the worst offender in this regard.

The global media outlet Al Jazeera, which the State Department describes as “government owned,” published an offensive video during the second week of Ramadan this year that denied and distorted basic facts about the Holocaust. Following outcry, the network removed the video, suspended two journalists, and said it would apply some sensitivity training.

Yet at this same time the religious fundamentalist most empowered by Al Jazeera, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, continued to remain in the regime’s good graces.

Even though Qaradawi has advocated genocide against the Jewish people and advocated terrorism against American civilians and soldiers in Iraq, Qatar’s ruler kissed Qaradawi and gave him the seat at his side at his Ramadan iftar, ahead of all other preachers and for at least the fifth year in a row.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Qaradawi published a column in a Qatari paper dehumanizing Jewish people by calling them the offspring of apes and pigs.

Nor were the views broadcast by Al Jazeera or published by Qaradawi an isolated phenomenon during this Ramadan.

Yup, @IfNotNowOrg is linking this to Israel because that's their hateful strategy. Take anything that pisses people off and claim that Israel does it.

Which is exactly what antisemites have done to Jews for millennia.https://t.co/xafoHf2Oio https://t.co/FehS0th9cE
— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) July 5, 2019

Why is the right of Jews to live in their ancestral homeland - including in areas where Jews were ethnically cleansed - not a human rights issue, but instead a "far right wing" issue? https://t.co/V3qJqe87pT
— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) July 2, 2019

What former diplomat and pundit is stupid enough to compare the discovery and preservation of priceless archaeological treasures with their willful destruction?

Ladies and gentlemen, @Martin_Indyk .

This tweet alone disqualifies him from being taken seriously by anyone. pic.twitter.com/Xw6ZqxLxjY
— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) July 2, 2019

If you believe that recognizing the fact of the Armenian genocide is the moral position to take despite political objections by Turkey....

You should believe that openly recognizing the Jewish history and claim on Jerusalem is the moral position to take despite Arab objections.
— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) July 2, 2019

If you've said Kaddish more times over Gazans and immigrants than for actual victims of the Holocaust, you don't have the right to invoke the Holocaust.
— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) July 1, 2019

Does any sane person doubt that the Palestinian leadership, including @ErakatSaeb and @abbaspresident, have been hysterical and stupid by rejecting every single peace initiative? Backing every despot? Being blind to how their fellow Arabs are sick of their antics? https://t.co/DBxXEvPjWJ
— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) July 4, 2019

Since you are a science reporter, you certainly have some objective studies to back up this insane statement, right?
— Elder Of Ziyon ҉ (@elderofziyon) July 4, 2019

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From MEMRI:

Palestinian Children Burn U.S. Flag, Pictures of Trump in PA-Run Summer Camp That Integrates Children with Special Needs

On July 3, 2019, the Palestinian Authority's Higher Council for Youth and Sports uploaded to its Facebook page a video about a summer camp that it was running in Tulkarm in the West Bank. Ihsan Hattab, the camp director, said that the camp's goal is to provide children with a patriotic education and that the camp is under the Higher Council's auspices and is run by the Society for Children with Autism and Learning Disabilities. He added that 25 special needs children aged 13-15 were participating in the camp along with 100 non-disabled Palestinian children. Yaman, a young boy participating in the program, said that in the first day of the program, they discussed the Deal of the Century and that the following day, they tore up and burned pictures of the American flag and U.S. President Donald Trump. The video shows young children tearing up and burning the pictures and stepping on pictures of the flag and of Donald Trump with horns.

This is not as bad as the paramilitary summer camps of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, but it is still teaching hate - even to children with disabilities.

Many years ago I made a video about Gaza summer camps, inspired by a post title by Soccer Dad, called "Hello Martyr, Hello Fatah." YouTube took down one of my channels last year and the video along with many others are no longer on that platform, but here it is again:

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Jordan withdraws from European @OSCE conference - because their delegation were seated next to Israel's

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is holding a conference in Luxembourg this week.

60 countries were invited to discuss rights, security, democracy and terrorism cooperation.

Both Israel and Jordan were invited.

But the Jordanian delegation, headed by Assistant Speaker of the House of Representatives MP Ibrahim Al-Qar'an, withdrew from the first day of the conference.

The reason? To protest against the seating of its delegation site near to an Israeli delegation!

Al-Qar'an said that his delegation, which includes other Jordanian members of parliament, withdrew after he was surprised that the seat allocated to him was at the same table prepared for the Israeli delegation.

The Jordanians made several attempts to pressure the organizers of the conference to change the seat of the Jordanian delegation or to remove the Israeli delegation. They refused, properly.

Al-Qar'an said that despite the delegation's keenness to participate in the conference, the principle of not sitting next to Israeli Jews "came from our principles and ethics and our noble religion that does not allow us to sit with this occupier of our holy sites."

This puerile snub was not reported in Western media. The conference didn't tweet about it. As is normally the case, an Arab country acting like a spoiled child is coddled and accepted. (And the stories are reported triumphantly in Arabic media.)

The only way to handle these sorts of situations is to publicly shame the nation that refuses to treat Israel as an equal, and to expel them from the organization that they are boycotting.

Sweeping it under the rug helps no one except the offender.

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07/04 Links Pt2: Yoni Netanyahu, Israel, and the Fourth of July; Keith Ellison Embraces Antisemitic UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn; The anti-Israel LGBT community should think again

From Ian:

Yoni Netanyahu, Israel, and the Fourth of July

On July 4, 1976, Yonatan Netanyahu re-sent America and the entire world a message that Jews have been delivering for thousands of years.

Yes, we have such things as the Hebrew Bible’s message of proclaiming liberty throughout the land on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, and the first colonists seeing Americas as the “New Zion” and such. But, for now, I’m referring to something post-biblical…

Rabbi Hillel, a contemporary of Yehoshua/Jesus, who lived during the Roman occupation of Judaea, restated already ancient Jewish teachings when he proclaimed: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am not for others, what am I?"

Israel has tried very hard to come to fair accommodations with the "others" in its neighborhood…indeed, those who see the entire region as merely purely Arab patrimony: Justice through Arab eyes only.

The compromises Israel has already accepted (i.e., Jordan was created in 1922 on almost 80% of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine--just for starters) and has subsequently sought with Arabs, who already possess almost two dozen states, are light years beyond what Arabs have offered to scores of millions of non-Arab, native peoples with whom they have clashed and competed themselves.

As I’ve often stated before, nothing will really change until the oppressive, self-centered, supremacist Arab mindset changes. Until then, Israel must concentrate on the first part of Rabbi Hillel's famous quote--seeing that its own resurrected nation and millennially-persecuted people not only survive but prosper.

Reflecting on One of Israel's Most Daring Rescue Missions

Forty-three years ago, Israeli forces executed one of the most brave and daring missions in the country's history — the rescue of the over 100 hostages at a Uganda airport. Ex-Mossad agent Avner Avraham discusses with host Jeff Smith.

📅#OnThisDay in 1976, in perhaps the world's most famous counterterrorism operation, Israel successfully rescued 102 hostages from PFLP terrorists at Entebbe Airport.

🕯Yoni Netanyahu pic.twitter.com/Es2X2MhlIX
— Mark Regev (@MarkRegev) July 4, 2019

Cartoon of the Day: BDS success

Continuing on my series of re-captioning single panel cartoons....

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